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Westchase Parking Garage Changing Its Stripes, Spots Under New Parkway Control

A reader sends a shot of the roof of the last of the 4 former BMC Software campus parking garages to get put on the parking-space straight-and-narrow. Last Friday the angled stripes got powerwashed off of the top floor of the turn-of-the-millenium structure, which sits along CityWest Blvd. north of the new Phillips 66 campus just outside Beltway 8. All of the remaining garages on the site appear to have been restriped one at a time over the past decade or so with 90-degree parking spots (as can be seen on the roof of another of the garages in the upper right, further north along CityWest). The office complex goes by CityWestPlacethese days; the complex is one of the properties held by new Houston-only REIT (New) Parkway, which was formed earlier this month when old Parkway and Cousins Properties merged then dumped all of their Houston holdings into a new, separate REIT.

Perpendicular spaces will better fit in with the campus’s general rectilinear motifs — for example, with this series of narrow rectangular water features on the other side of that northern parking garage:

Angled parking spaced CAN be more space efficient if you design the lanes for one-way traffic. The pitch (the width of the space measured parallel to the aisle) and the projected length (depth of the space measure perpendicular to the aisle) are both larger for angled spaces, but if you can reduce the aisle width due to the relative ease of maneuvering into an angled space, then in certain situations, you can fit more spaces than you otherwise could with 90-degree spaces.
However, if the aisle has to be wide enough for two-way traffic, then you (usually) can’t reduce the aisle width enough to compensate for the larger parking spaces. The way these are striped appear to be for two-way traffic, and the total width is already set, so re-striping for 90-degree spaces will almost certainly increase the space count.
The other argument is that angled spaces are generally easier to get in and out of, so parking lots designed for high turnover (e.g. supermarkets) are often designed with angled spaces even when it’s not the most space-efficient design. This is less of a concern for employee parking at an office building, where most spaces turn over only once or twice per day.

A one-way office parking garage is much more of a hassle than a two-way. Hope that’s where they’re headed with this.
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If we’re starting a parking lot discussion though I’d like to nominate the Heights Wal-Mart for worst in town. You park 5 spaces deep and you’re already halfway across the parking lot away from the store. It’s like they assumed everyone was going to be parking F-350’s.